A Division Of The Spoils (Raj Quartet 4) (35 page)

She was such an unegotistical person, such a champion of other people’s causes, that it seems grossly unfair to connect her in any way with responsibility for a death roll that was never accurately counted but which has become widely accepted as reaching the one-quarter million mark.

‘Your Punjabis,’ she said when I got back from the euphoric and bloodstained country after taking the trip to ‘observe and supervise’ which she had subsidized in 1947, ‘Your Punjabis would appear to have taken leave of their senses.’

She was referring to the massacres that accompanied the migrations of communities after the decision to partition. I told her that the murders of Hindus and Sikhs by Muslims and of Muslims by Hindus and Sikhs had by no stretch of the imagination been confined to the land of the five rivers, but Punjab was a word which had always had a strong appeal for people like Aunt Charlotte and she probably felt that once you had pronounced it (particularly as she pronounced it, with a rotundity of mouth and emphasis of jaw – Poonjawb) then you had said all that needed to be said about the golden land below Afghanistan. She therefore continued to demarcate the zone of violence on this provincial basis and I think succeeded too in mentally reducing the slaughter to the manageable proportions of an isolated act of insurrection which was the result of allowing things to get a bit out of hand.

It would never have occurred to her to examine her conscience in regard to those one-quarter million deaths, although she had, in fact, as I had done – voted for them. It would not have occurred to her because she held single-mindedly to the Purvis principle, the view that a British presence in India was an economic and administrative burden whose quick offloading was an essential feature of post-war policy in the welfare state. I’ll give her this, though: in adhering to this principle she never once introduced the ethical argument that colonialism was immoral – an argument that supported so many of us. I don’t think the ethical
argument ever entered her head. She was esentially a pragmatist. The only moral argument I ever remember her advancing was the one she used to try to convince me that my joining up would be unfair to the men she assumed I would accept responsibility for.

Needless to say, I never told Aunt Charlotte that she, as well as I, was responsible for the one-quarter million deaths in the Punjab and elsewhere. But I did once ask her who, in her opinion,
was
responsible. She said, ‘But that is obvious. The people who attacked and killed each other.’ There was no arguing with this, but it confirmed my impression of her historical significance (and mine), of the overwhelming importance of the part that had been played in British-Indian affairs by the indifference and the ignorance of the English at home – whom Aunt Charlotte, in an especially poignant way had in my mind come to represent; and upsetting though I found it, nothing was more appropriate than that in that delirium, when images of all the acquired and borrowed interests of her life flowed swiftly through her heated imagination, images of India were totally forgotten.

*

In investing someone with historical significance one should proceed cautiously but I think the conclusion I came to about her share of responsibility for disorder and bloodshed can be traced back to that grey humid morning in Kalyan when I stood up and spoke for half an hour to a hall full of restless and inattentive men about the territorial ambitions of Mahdaji and Daulat Rao Sindia, and realized how little any of us knew or cared about a country whose history had been that of our own for more than three hundred years and which had contributed more than any other to our wealth, our well-being.

Less than a month later I was passing through Deolali to embark at Bombay on a homeward-bound ship in a mood alternating between the exhilaration of a man released to follow his own bent and the depression of one who retires from a situation gratefully but with some doubts about the
means he’s adopted to extricate himself. There were as well some unexpected regrets.

If I had been with Ronald Merrick right up to the time when the signal came ordering me to report to Deolali, I doubt that I should have felt anything except relief and grateful astonishment at the speed with which Aunt Charlotte had apparently worked. But I wasn’t with him; rather, he wasn’t with me and the signal happened to arrive at a moment when I was aware of being comfortably situated and pleasantly occupied.

*

In the morning, after that night journey from Ranpur in the Governor’s special coach, when Rowan and I bumped into each other in the narrow passage between Their Excellencies’ compartments (w.c. on one side, shower on the other) he was polite but (I thought) a little cool. I think he assumed I was lying when I told him I had no hangover, or assumed that I had already started on one of the bottles in my kit-bag so that I could face up to another day with Merrick and the Red Shadow.

He may have been right about the hangover because my recollections of the arrival in Pankot aren’t very clear. But there could be another reason for that. To have travelled on the same train as a coffin without knowing it is one thing. To be greeted by a large crowd banging on drums another. I don’t recall how soon it was before I connected the crowds and the drums with a funeral, or the funeral with a coffin that had come in on the train, or the coffin with the body of Mr Kasim’s secretary, and I’m not sure whether it was Merrick’s information alone, or Merrick’s and the Red Shadow’s plus other people’s that helped me to fit the pieces together. What I do remember is that it was nothing Nigel Rowan said because he said very little. An impression I had that morning was of not inspiring his confidence; another was that as a result of whatever conversation he’d had with Merrick the night before there was an amiability between them now which seemed, on Rowan’s part, advertised to show me that he discounted everything I had told him about that officer’s behaviour. Without caring much what the answer was I
wondered whether Nigel had said anything to Merrick about my attitude to him, and whether Merrick’s silence in the 15 cwt that Area
HQ
had sent to the station for us was especially ominous.

Nigel’s detachment, Merrick’s silence, the distracting crowds at the station, the drums and the shouting, the revolting stink of the Red Shadow’s stale breath and unwashed body in the confined luggage-loaded space at the tarpaulin-covered back of the truck: these have stayed with me as parts of the jig-saw. Another part of it is waiting, in several places; keeping upwind of the Pathan if on the same verandah with him and moving if he came too near. The waiting was done in the complex of old Victorian barracks and huts of more recent origin that was Area Headquarters. A dry sunny morning? Something cool but hard – metallic – in the air, the smell of a century or more of Pankot’s experience of military occupation. A late breakfast in a British
NCOS
’ mess. Eating it alone at a long table as yet uncleared of used plates and cups and saucers. The depredations of white ants in wooden window frames set in crumbling plaster. Views from these windows of the hills. The sound of a coppersmith. Shafts of sunlight? A padlocked glass-fronted cupboard that displayed a few silver cups, sporting-trophies. A dartboard and last night’s chalked scores. A little bit of Salisbury Plain in the Indian hills. I had never hated the army so much as I did in this hour or two in this drearily familiar and horribly anonymous area of roads and pathways, directional signs, inhospitable huts and characterless rooms – the makeshift impermanent jerry-built structures that seem to rest for sole support on the implacable and rigid authority of military hierarchy. The fire of hatred (so intense, so unexpected, so out of character) was stoked and fanned by a sudden and utter lack of confidence in the machine I thought I had set in motion with the telegram and letter to Aunt Charlotte. The illusion of imminent escape withered away in this uncompromising and heartless reality.

Another piece of the jig-saw: as I sat beneath the dartboard, stupefied by this misery, there was a distant crackling fusillade of shots whose echoes bounced from one hill to another. When the echoes were finally spent I heard the uninterrupted song of the coppersmith. No barking. The birds
and dogs of Pankot – wild or tame – were used to the sound of range practice.

And I remember relief when the truck came back from wherever it had been with Merrick and the Red Shadow and I was taken by the driver (a surly, solitary man) from the
NCOS
’ mess; relief that was short-lived because it ended in another anonymous room, an annexe in the grounds of the General Hospital (military wing) which I later discovered lay approximately half-way between Area Headquarters and the lines of the Pankot Rifles depot.

From the window of this room there was no view at all. The hospital was well provided with shade trees and the annexe was half-hidden in bushes. I didn’t bother to ask the driver why I was to be quartered there, nor did I ask where Merrick and the Red Shadow were. One of the pleasures of being a sergeant is of feeling under no obligation to satisfy your curiosity about the background to events. You don’t originate
anything
if you can help it. Delivered by the driver, admitted by a servant (who must have had an instruction from somewhere) I entered the room in the annexe and because it had a bed had no difficulty in assuming that this was where I was to sleep while in Pankot. I dumped pack and kit-bag and lay down.

Out of this phase (morning of August 14 to morning of August 16) one important minor figure emerges: that of an
RAMC
corporal, a young man from Bermondsey. I shall call him Corporal Dixon. The British
NCOS
on the hospital staff messed together and formed a little clique. It was a very unmilitary set-up: sergeants, corporals, but not lance-corporals. Driven by hunger to leave the room in the annexe and find the mess-hut I found I was expected, but I think only as a man with a name and the barest identification. I was received in a friendly easy-going fashion and given a beer. The mess conveyed an idea of intellectual superiority. There was a Van Gogh reproduction on one wall and the sound of Mozart from the portable gramophone. A few of the
NCOS
had seen service in the field. For them, Pankot was a relief station. Among these front-line veterans was Corporal Dixon, known affectionately as Sophie, or Miss Dixon, or Mum.

I was told that he kept the patients in the wards in stitches
and that he had tamed the
QA
nursing sisters and the medical officers. I was also told that a wounded officer who had watched him at work at a casualty clearing station in the Arakan and listened to the stream of morale-boosting queenly chat – a mocking commentary on the sounds of battle near by – had said: ‘You deserve the
MM,
Corporal.’ Sophie had said, ‘Oh that would never do, sir, I wouldn’t presume, and where would they pin it, the cheeky things?’

But these tales came later when I set about trying to find out how I had offended, what had caused the temperature to drop. Between the friendly reception and the freezing up no more than a few hours passed. Dixon’s first appearance was at lunch. ‘A copper!’ he said, fingering my green armband. ‘Has someone been at the drugs? It’s no good looking here, sergeant, we’re all clean-living boys. It’s that Matron over at Private. She’s never been the same since she visited Cox’s Bazaar looking for a bargain and found it closed for stocktaking.’

I laughed and was introduced. Dixon was rather welcome comic relief. Perhaps if I hadn’t laughed he would have been tipped the wink to quieten down. Lunch was at a long table. White cloth. A vase or two of marigolds. I was at one end, as I remember, and Dixon at the other. The atmosphere was amiable. Once it was established that I wasn’t at the hospital on duty but only quartered temporarily in the annexe I don’t think any further questions were asked. I remember that towards the end of the meal all conversation died away because Dixon had taken the stage and was recounting a series of scurrilous but very funny stories, most of them delivered in a tone of prim outrage, of astonishment at the trickery and under-handedness of the world. It took me some time to sort out the code. After failing to see the point several times I realized that ‘she’ almost invariably meant ‘he’. A sentence such as ‘Well you should have seen her, got up to the nines in her new frock, preening she was, poor old thing, well she doesn’t often have one does she?’ didn’t, I discovered, refer to a matron at a hospital dance but to a senior officer of the
RAMC
or the
IMS
who was wearing a new uniform, hadn’t been looking where he was going and had bumped into and
knocked Corporal Dixon over at a moment when he happened to be carrying a bed-pan full of urine. ‘So there she was, drenched with Private Thingummy’s piss, new dress ruined, and there was me flat on me bum and covered in piss too, thinking I’d really ask for me cards this time. But you can’t beat breeding, can you? “Is that Corporal Dixon?” she says to Matron looking down her nose, oh very ladylike. “I’m afraid it is,” Matron says. “I see,” she says. “I suppose it was not entirely his fault so we won’t hold it against him.” Well as to
that
, I thinks to meself, chance would be a fine thing.’

How much of Dixon’s tale was true one could only guess. (Did
RAMC
corporals carry bedpans in India?) What was clear was his rôle. He was the safety-valve. How well-timed and sustained his performances were over a period I could not judge except from the behaviour of his companions in the mess. Presumably he knew when to play up and when to give it a rest. I detected no signs either of boredom or aggression. Before the meal was quite over the steward brought in a note. It was for me; from Merrick. The truck-driver had brought it. I got up to leave.

‘Are you with us for long, Sergeant?’ Sophie Dixon called out. I told him probably for a day or two; added that I’d see them tonight anyway.